


Oh, When You Loved Him

by orphan_account



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alcohol, Dream Sex, Grief/Mourning, Grieving, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Ok so maybe I've been on the Locus angst train, but this is like the first class dining car of the Locus angst train, dream professions of heavy emotions, not porn levels of explicit anyway, sleep paralysis, the Love word, too little too late, woops jumped on the angst train
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 10:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5372552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”</p>
<p>But you never told him, and he always was. He always would have been. Dreaming otherwise changed nothing. </p>
<p>Including how much you missed him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oh, When You Loved Him

**Author's Note:**

> “When is a monster not a monster” quote by Caitlyn Siehl.

It was a dream. You knew that. Felix’s death was too inescapable, too oppressive for you not to realize the unreality. But knowing didn’t wake you. It couldn’t: Felix didn’t want to let you go.

He had his hands on your shoulders, punching holes through your skin with his nails while his knees knocked against your rib cage with an incessant, insistent rhythm you fully expected to leave bruises. _Your_ rhythm. There was nothing between you in the hazy space of dreamscape, and the two of you were warm, sticky between the sheets. When you lied down across him, you adhered to each other. Chest to chest, bound with sweat to the aching, frantic rhythm of one another’s heartbeats.

You trapped him under you, loving the stutter in his breathing, and crushed his hip into your palm. His lips against your mouth; your teeth, your tongue. He tasted like saliva and metal and salt. The ring in his lip bashed against your teeth.

He whined and wrapped his arms around you. Tightened his grip across a sore spot on your shoulder blade—a gunshot, a knife wound, you didn’t know which; only that the two of you had come from battle, and that he still was still sweating a smell like gunmetal as you slammed into him with fittingly, fully-automatic speed.

You sucked a purple mark onto his neck. Gifted him your dental-impression with a hemorrhage. They could have identified your body using nothing but Felix, if only he had killed you first: how many times had you done this, after all, in all the years you’d known him? How many bites, how many kisses, how many cries? He was begging you, clinging to you for stability, sweat-sopped hair pasted to his forehead, dripping into lidded eyes as he struggled to raise his head. You could tell by his pale exhaustion that you’d been in bed with him in this dream for hours. That this was only one round of intimacy out of tens, thousands, of infinite repetitions of the same story, of the narrative you had yet to break. That this moment in which you found yourself was in _medias res_ , nothing but a preamble to _fatum iustum stultorum_ : to the messy conclusion to this dream, which you would pretend not to see until he forced you to.

Felix begged you. _Locs—_

_Please—_

You pulled back and away from him as you slowed, as you reduced your eager fucking to gentle, rhythmic rocking, tilting his hip beneath the pressure of your palm. You lost yourself to the sight of him. To the sound of his panting as his head fell back into his pillow and the slide of his hands down your arms. To the arching of his spine and the movement of his torso back and forth against the mattress and the whispering of the sheets beneath him. To the soft sounds you drew from him, pressing with steady consistency against the epicenter of his body. Muffled whines and stifled gasps. Growls and groans at higher and higher pitches until, keening, his eyes rolled and his voice broke and he cut into your forearms where he held them and his toes curled where they hung by your hips, and he arched, and he threw his head back, sideways, and choked to a completion that left him shivering. Shuddering. Seizing to the erratic tempo of his satiated, slackening body and the fluttering baseline of his pulse. You rejoiced at every beat of it. Like this, he was beautiful. Like this, peaceful, he was yours. Like this, yours was all he wanted to be.

You were still staring at him when his eyes refocused. When his shaking hands left your arms, one to fall across his heaving chest, one to punch you without strength in your stomach.

_"What’re you looking at?"_

Felix, of course.

You pulled free of him, not yet finished yourself. But that had never mattered. You settled beside him and leaned across him, and rested your forehead against his. Your hair fell into his face. He swept it away with his fingers; raked them across your scalp. You liked it, that mercilessness. You thought your heart might burst as he tilted his head back, lifted his mouth to find yours. You kissed his bottom lip alone. Then his upper. Pinched it between your teeth and let it fall away before pressing into it again with a strange and gentle, earnest tenderness with your lips alone.

Felix hummed and went slack beneath you. Kept his fingers loosely woven through your hair, even as you retracted. The pull of them felt so perfect that you ached.

Felix grunted as you left him, the sound unhappy, pouty. His eyes had fallen closed, but he opened one of them to glare at you, and found you smiling. There was a sound, from somewhere. Maybe it was you, so happy—for the first time in longer than you could remember—that you were humming.

Felix frowned. Squinted. Demanded.

_"What?"_

And it shouldn’t have been so easy. That tone of his was dangerous and it shouldn’t have been easy, and it was, you knew, you _knew,_ only because he wasn’t _really_ alive to hear you. You shouldn’t have been able to speak at all. But it _was_ easy, and instead you told him the truth.

_"I love you."_

It fell from you and his eyes went wide and oh, you were _certain_ for a second, even in your dreamscape, that you’d broken something, because his mouth opened without words, and he was _silent._ And then he laughed. A short burst, a sort of cackle. Flabbergasted. Astounded. He looked up at you and spoke.

_"Yeah, asshole. I know."_

And maybe he pulled you down or maybe you came to him on your own but in any case he let you snake your arms around him and lift him off the mattress and kiss him, long and hard against his smile.

So long you couldn’t breathe.

Felix wouldn’t let you leave.

He kissed you and kissed you and he _swallowed_ you, you imagined, as your lungs continued to fail you and your nose refused your exhalations and all you could inhale in was his breath through your mouth, poisoning you, made of nothing but the taste of him and CO2.

 

*

 

You woke suffocating and paralyzed. Your lungs wouldn’t respond to your orders for you to breathe, though you thought you could hear, in the distance, a gasping sort of wheeze as they did what little they could. The ceiling was a blur above you. An orange tinted blur. You thought you could see him, perched atop you, whether to fuck you or gut you, you didn’t know. You didn’t have the words to describe it. You knew only that he was _present,_ in some hazy way; a ghost, a memory, a cause for nausea, and that you couldn’t move to throw him off. All you could do was gasp without breathing, giving way slowly to the pressure on your chest while you heart hammered, racing its way to bursting.

And then it was over. And all of your tensed muscles reengaged at once. And you jolted upright, and right out of your bunk, crashing to the floor, curled up on yourself, alone on the ship you’d used to escape on. The deck dug into your shoulder your cheek your hip as you shuddered some semblance of breathing, choking on a sound much, much, too like a sob. Your cheek was wet. Cold where the floor met it.

Felix was gone.

You were free, and he was gone.

You gagged on the thought and your breath hitched. The sound of it was horrid.

What you wanted—what you _thought_ you wanted, with your mind reduced to static and wordless, metallic screeching and the roar of your own pulse—was the comfort of your armor. The weight and pressure and the closeness. The safety. But your chest was still aching, and you were still swallowing more air than you were breathing, too desperate to get any oxygen at all, and the armor, you knew, was tight. Pressurizing. You turned your face into the floor. You'd never told him. And he was gone.

_I love you._

You choked on your next breath and it broke free of you before you could gain anything from it, high and cracking, splitting, like another sob.

_I love you._

In spite of everything he’d done.

You scrambled to your feet. Tripped twice, felt your kneecap crack against the floor. Another break to match the rib you’d shattered when the _Tartarus_ descended on you. Your desperate, uneven breathing all but ripped through your punctured lung. When you coughed, it tasted like blood.

_I love you._

That’s why you’d hated the truth so much.

You tried not to think as you limped, half running, half falling, to the galley. Tried not to remember an artificial voice and what it told you, how you knew it to be true. Tried to forget the last thing Felix said to you. The sound of him giving up on you, and on surviving. You tried to erase the bitter feeling of reflecting his words back onto him when those same words had been the thing that had finally shattered you. _I’m doing this—_

_I love you._

The whiskey belonged to Felix. You tried to pour it for yourself, and spilled it, instead, across the counter.

You flung an arm out and sent the bottle and glass alike flying. Threw them to the floor, where they broke around your feet. Like Felix when you found him.

You stepped on shattered glass as you lunged for the next cabinet, uncorked the first thing you could see through blurring, watering eyes and a world rendered shaky by your gasping and your shivering. It was some alien liquor. You didn’t know what it would do to you. What its colony of origin was. But it was nice. Expensive. You tore it open with trembling hands and pressed it to your lips and tried not to notice if the burning scent that hit you was the same way Felix had sometimes smelled when a mission went well— _I love you, I love you, I loved you—_ as you collapsed to your knees, shoulder dug into the raised pattern of the metal cabinet, glass crunching under you, diaphragm heaving beneath the weight of your emotions until it _hurt_.

Kneeling on the ground that you’d painted with blood and whiskey, had turned sticky and messy and cold, you drank until you choked: If you were going to weep for Felix, you wouldn’t remember it when you woke.


End file.
